New World’s Combat Will Be Weapon-Based Over Traditional Classes

Amazon has teased putting their toes in the gaming waters for quite some time, and it’s getting pretty close for their first major splash with the MMO New World. The game was originally set to make its grand debut next month, but due to COVID-19 complications it was pushed to August. In the meantime, we got some new details about the game’s combat, as well as the ambitious timeline.

As detailed via Respawnfirst, the combat of New World is aiming to be quite a bit different than the typical MMO standard. Studio Head Richard Lawrence explained that instead of classes, combat will be based around  weapons. There won’t even be spells in the traditional sense, instead everything coming down to a more open idea of magic, one that is flexible for players to change more freely.

“It’s a conscious decision to go after a low fantasy. The way magic exists in New World is really physical. We don’t have traditional spells, everything is worked through weapons being classless. We’ve really tried to make magic feel more substantial than ethereal.”

Game Director Scot Lane elaborated, saying they wanted to create something more action focused than most MMORPGs, having players think more about their positions, and things like staggering that’s not often in the DNA of the genre.

“Your position and physics matter in-game, to you and the world and other players. And that creates a tension that you don’t see in other games like this because you have to stay on your toes.

“When someone – regardless of equipment – could trounce us on the floor, it showed us this really is a skill-based game. A lot of MMO players aren’t familiar with staggering, or block-breaking, or other things you’ll see referred to in fighting games, and we’re trying to teach MMO players that as fast as possible.”

There’s obviously a lot of ambition here, and not only that, it seems the team is hoping to have “ten-plus years’ time” on the title, meaning they are looking at this in a decade timeline, at least. We’ll see how it all fares when New World launches on August 25th.